blog

❥

Statement in Response to #GrandmaGoneWild’s Blog Post

July 01, 2017Tula community

Recently, a blog post was shared detailing the experience of a retailer that applied to carry our products and was denied. In the blog post, the retailer described how they were denied despite meeting our stated criteria. Our response to them was done very poorly and information available to us was not properly considered during the application review process. They were left to believe that the denial was based on their race. Once the blog post was published and we were made aware of the pain we caused, we reached out to the retailer again to apologize and clarify our reasoning. But, again, our team did not handle the communication with this retailer well.

We are incredibly sorry for the hurt we have caused and for the way that Crunchy Boutique was initially responded to. We are also very sorry for the harm we have caused to marginalized communities in the babywearing community.

Since this morning, we have been in communication with Lauren and Keema of Crunchy Boutique. They have been incredibly generous in allowing us to speak with them and move forward to correct the mistakes and hurt we have caused. We are deeply honored to welcome Crunchy Boutique as a retailer and support them as a black-owned natural parenting store. They are trailblazers in the community and they have agreed to work with us to ensure that more voices of color are represented, valued, and that we do not make the same mistakes we have made again. Thank you to Crunchy Boutique for doing the continued labor of teaching us better practices, with regards to diversity and inclusivity.

Moving forward, our team will be participating in inclusivity training, in part facilitated by Crunchy Boutique and an Inclusivity and Diversity consultant who we are working with. We will reformat our retailer application to allow for retailers to share what makes them unique and how they support their local community. We will also continue to work harder to support people of color, black-owned businesses, and organizations so that they are given rightfully deserved space in this community.

Baby Tula in no way supports racism or hate. We, as a company, have much to learn and we understand the importance of educating oneself so that our business practices align with the just and equal world we want to live in. We want the babywearing community to reflect that as well, and will do our part to be part of the progress we want to see there.We want to thank everyone who is taking the time to help us through this journey: in particular Keema and Lauren of Crunchy Boutique, and Donna of Black Women Do Cloth Diaper. We hope to move forward and uplift the voices of marginalized communities for their incredible work and do better by them in the future.